The. Ministry of higher and secondary special education

The advantages of using authentic materials:
1. Authentic materials bring learners into direct contact with a reality level of Business English.
2. Authentic materials drawn from periodicals are always up-to-date and constantly being updated.
3. Authentic materials from a particular source, such as The Economist, tend to work in consistent areas of language, so, after a while, students who practice reading The Economist will become experts in reading English language business publications.
4. Authentic materials provide us with a source of up-to-date materials that can be directly relevant to business English learners’ needs.
David Heitler in his article emphasizes some important criteria for choosing an appropriate article, they are as follows:
1. Topic. Is this the kind of real English that my student(s) need? Will we get additional value out of a marriage between the real English in these materials and my learners’ real business (and general) knowledge?
2. Target language area. Is it up-to-date? Is it topical? Will even experts – as the students are – learn something new? Will they be able to combine their knowledge of the world with the knowledge they gain from this material?
3. Skills. Are we limiting the area of language sufficiently for the students to feel that they are making genuine progress?
4. Students needs and interests. Is this material directly relevant to the students’ requirements? [2]
One of the disadvantages of authentic materials is its difficulty, but there is the point. The trick, regardless of the text used, is not to edit and grade the text, but to grade the task according to the students' abilities. This is for three reasons: most importantly, it reflects the kind of situation your students may face in an English speaking environment, it saves you time and energy and lastly it encourages and motivates your students when they can 'conquer' a real text. Naturally certain texts will lend themselves more easily to certain levels [2, 3].
At lower levels some possibilities include leaflets, timetables, menus, short headline type reports, audio and video advertising, or short news broadcasts. The task should be simple and relatively undemanding, and it is important to pre-teach key vocabulary so as to prevent panic.
At more intermediate levels this list could be expanded to include longer articles, four or five minute TV or radio news reports, a higher quantity of shorter items, or even whole TV programmes, if your copyright agreements allow it. Again pre-teaching is important, although your students should be able to deal with unknown vocabulary to some extent.
At an advanced level students should have some tactics for dealing with new vocabulary without panicking, but it's still useful to have a few quick definitions to hand for some of the trickier stuff!
As can be seen, a key problem is to deal with unknown language. One of the methods that some teachers use in their practice is ignoring new vocabulary provided the students can complete the task without it! Especially with lower levels, it needs to be emphasized that students do not have to understand everything. Many students don't often believe that they can cope until going through a few tasks with their teachers. Teaching them this skill, and developing their confidence at coping with the unknown is an important element in their development as independent learners.
As can be seen, using authentic materials is a relatively easy and convenient way of improving not only your students' general skills, but also their confidence in a real situation. This is only a brief introduction to the ideas involved, but some of these ideas could easily be expanded to form part of a motivating and effective course.
2.2. Authentic materials in the classroom: the advantages
In my first two years of EFL teaching, I wasn’t aware of the advantages of using authentic materials in the classroom.
Like many post-CELTA teachers, I was emotionally attached to the dreaded grammatical syllabus and turning pages in coursebooks.
I mostly taught lower level learners early on in my career. However, there was such a range of authentic materials I could have brought to the table. For instance, I could have exploited songs, posters, flyers, menus and video and audio advertising.